Cory Booker: “Black Trojan Horse For The Republican Rightwing”

This weekend, hard at work on an upcoming NFSWCORP print feature about NJ mayor Cory Booker, I saw that the New York Times finally made an official endorsement of Booker for New Jersey Senator.

The NYT praised Booker—an African-American lawyer—as a more progressive and more populist version of Obama, a guy who’s not afraid to get down and dirty. NYT’s editorial wizards called Booker a “deeply unconventional politician, once rushing into a burning house before the fire department arrived — saving a woman and traumatizing his security detail,” and predicted that he “will be able to use his political star status to fight for the neglected, the powerless, people who are working and people who need to work in New Jersey and nationally”…

Unconventional indeed. That’s what my print piece is about: Booker’s unconventionalism. Specifically: his unconventional—and downright disturbing—relationship with rabbis from a rabid right-wing Hasidic cult, which, among other things, believes that their dead Rebbe is the messiah and pushes all sorts of regressive positions: ulta-violent Islamaphobia, Holocaust denialism, railing against abortion and intermarriage…

You’ll read all about it in a month or so.

But there is another unconventional side to Cory Booker that NYT left out: He may be running as a Democrat, but Booker’s long been seen in certain African-American circles as a covert weapon of the White Right—a "Black Trojan Horse for the Republican rightwing,” to quote retired Harvard professor Martin Kilson, the first African-American to receive full tenure at that institution.

Back in 2002, when the young Booker was running for mayor of Newark, prof Kilson described him as “an errand boy Black politician for conservative Republican power-class penetration of governing control of Black Newark.” Booker was much more candid about his political values and policy positions back then, which included: bullshit “third-way” politics, small government, privatization of public housing and public education. Booker’s early rightwing political backers were also much more visible.

The NYT described Booker as progressive, but the fact is that his political career was launched with help from the rightwing industrial-thinktank complex. Specifically: money and connections provided by DeVos Amway billionaires, the Walton family, the Manhattan Institute and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation— the same folks who once backed crypto-eugenicist Charles Murray.

Booker was so good on the issues that WSJ’s Koch-boy John Fund endorsed Booker for Newark mayor, calling him a “potent national symbol for a new generation of black leaders who reject Al Sharpton-style racial polarization“ and noted Booker’s support for ”charter schools“ and ”school choice" (aka breaking teachers unions and turning public education over to private contractors)—because clearly that’s what black people need, and anyone who disagrees is speaking from a position of white privilege!

Reagan’s supply side groupie Jack Kemp also endorsed Booker in 2002, telling New York Magazine: “I don’t think there could be a finer young rising star in urban politics than Cory Booker. His policies go far beyond Democratic-Republican. There has to be a new way of thinking about poverty. Cory understands that private enterprise is not the enemy of the urban poor.” You have to remember that this was coming from a man who blamed government anti-poverty programs for creating poverty and said welfare was worse for blacks than Jim Crow.

Kemp’s the kind of guy Booker appealed to back then. And now Booker’s being backed by the New York Times.

Booker represents a generational leap in virtual progressive technology. If you thought Obama’s fake progressiveness was shocking, Booker's will blow you away.